Swimming microorganisms are a source of inspiration for small scale robots that are intended to operate in fluidic environments including complex biomedical fluids. Nature has devised swimming strategies that are effective at small scales and at low Reynolds number. These include the rotary corkscrew motion that, for instance, propels a flagellated bacterial cell, as well as the asymmetric beat of appendages that sperm cells or ciliated protozoa use to move through fluids. These mechanisms can overcome the reciprocity that governs the hydrodynamics at small scale. The complex molecular structure of biologically important fluids presents an additional challenge for the effective propulsion of microrobots. In this chapter it is shown how physical and chemical approaches are essential in realizing engineered abiotic micro- and nanorobots that can move in biomedically important environments. Interestingly, we also describe a microswimmer that is effective in biological viscoelastic fluids that does not have a natural analogue.

Using styles derived from existing popular character designs, we present a novel automatic stylization technique for body shape and colour information based on a statistical 3D model of human bodies. We investigate whether such stylized body shapes result in increased perceived appeal with two different experiments: One focuses on body shape alone, the other investigates the additional role of surface colour and lighting. Our results consistently show that the most appealing avatar is a partially stylized one. Importantly, avatars with high stylization or no stylization at all were rated to have the least appeal. The inclusion of colour information and improvements to render quality had no significant effect on the overall perceived appeal of the avatars, and we observe that the body shape primarily drives the change in appeal ratings. For body scans with colour information, we found that a partially stylized avatar was perceived as most appealing.

Most object detection systems consist of three stages. First, a set of individual hypotheses for object locations is generated using a proposal generating algorithm. Second, a classifier scores every generated hypothesis independently to obtain a multi-class prediction. Finally, all scored hypotheses are filtered via a non-differentiable and decoupled non-maximum suppression (NMS) post-processing step. In this paper, we propose a filtering network (FNet), a method which replaces NMS with a differentiable neural network that allows joint reasoning and re-scoring of the generated set of hypotheses per image. This formulation enables end-to-end training of the full object detection pipeline. First, we demonstrate that FNet, a feed-forward network architecture, is able to mimic NMS decisions, despite the sequential nature of NMS. We further analyze NMS failures and propose a loss formulation that is better aligned with the mean average precision (mAP) evaluation metric. We evaluate FNet on several standard detection datasets. Results surpass standard NMS on highly occluded settings of a synthetic overlapping MNIST dataset and show competitive behavior on PascalVOC2007 and KITTI detection benchmarks.

As most action generation problems of autonomous robots can be phrased in terms of sequential decision problems, robotics offers a tremendously important and interesting application platform for reinforcement learning. Similarly, the real-world challenges of this domain pose a major real-world check for reinforcement learning. Hence, the interplay between both disciplines can be seen as promising as the one between physics and mathematics. Nevertheless, only a fraction of the scientists working on reinforcement learning are sufficiently tied to robotics to oversee most problems encountered in this context. Thus, we will bring the most important challenges faced by robot reinforcement learning to their attention. To achieve this goal, we will attempt to survey most work that has successfully applied reinforcement learning to behavior generation for real robots. We discuss how the presented successful approaches have been made tractable despite the complexity of the domain and will study how representations or the inclusion of prior knowledge can make a significant difference. As a result, a particular focus of our chapter lies on the choice between model-based and model-free as well as between value function-based and policy search methods. As a result, we obtain a fairly complete survey of robot reinforcement learning which should allow a general reinforcement learning researcher to understand this domain.

In computational biology, it is common to represent domain knowledge using graphs. Frequently there exist multiple graphs for the same set of nodes, representing information from different sources, and no single graph is sufficient to predict class labels of unlabelled nodes reliably. One way to enhance reliability is to integrate multiple graphs, since individual graphs are partly independent and partly complementary to each other for prediction. In this chapter, we describe an algorithm to assign weights to multiple graphs within graph-based semi-supervised learning. Both predicting class labels and searching for weights for combining multiple graphs are formulated into one convex optimization problem. The graph-combining method is applied to functional class prediction of yeast proteins.When compared with individual graphs, the combined graph with optimized weights performs significantly better than any single graph.When compared with the semidefinite programming-based support vector machine (SDP/SVM), it shows comparable accuracy in a remarkably short time. Compared with a combined graph with equal-valued weights, our method could select important graphs without loss of accuracy, which implies the desirable property of integration with selectivity.

Many real-world machine learning problems are situated on finite discrete sets,
including dimensionality reduction, clustering, and transductive inference. A variety
of approaches for learning from finite sets has been proposed from different
motivations and for different problems. In most of those approaches, a finite set
is modeled as a graph, in which the edges encode pairwise relationships among the
objects in the set. Consequently many concepts and methods from graph theory are
adopted. In particular, the graph Laplacian is widely used.
In this chapter we present a systemic framework for learning from a finite set
represented as a graph. We develop discrete analogues of a number of differential
operators, and then construct a discrete analogue of classical regularization theory
based on those discrete differential operators. The graph Laplacian based approaches
are special cases of this general discrete regularization framework. An important
thing implied in this framework is that we have a wide choices of regularization on
graph in addition to the widely-used graph Laplacian based one.

Our goal for the competition (feature selection competition NIPS 2003) was to evaluate the usefulness of simple
machine learning techniques. We decided to use the correlation criteria as a feature selection method and Support Vector Machines for the classification part. Here we explain how we chose the regularization parameter C of the SVM, how we determined the kernel parameter and how we estimated the number of features used for each data set. All analyzes were carried out on the
training sets of the competition data. We choose the data set Arcene as an example
to explain the approach step by step.
In our view the point of this competition was the construction of a well performing
classifier rather than the systematic analysis of a specific approach. This is why our
search for the best classifier was only guided by the described methods and that we
deviated from the road map at several occasions.
All calculations were done with the software Spider [2004].

Embedded methods are a relatively new approach to feature selection. Unlike filter methods, which do not incorporate learning, and wrapper approaches, which can be used with arbitrary classifiers, in embedded methods the features selection part can not be separated from the learning part.
Existing embedded methods are reviewed based on a unifying mathematical framework.

We give all overview of linear and nonlinear optical processes that can be specific to chiral molecules in isotropic media. Specifically, we discuss the pseudoscalars that underlie nonlinear optical activity and chiral frequency conversion processes in fluids. We show that nonlinear optical techniques open entirely new ways of exploring chirality: Sum-frequency-generation (SFG) at second-order and BioCARS at fourth-order arise in the electric-dipole approximation and do not require circularly polarized light to detect chiral molecules in solution. Here the frequency conversion in itself is a measure of chirality. This is in contrast to natural optical activity phenomena which are based on the interference of radiation from induced oscillating electric and magnetic dipoles, and which are observed as a differential response to right and left circularly polarized light. We give examples from our SFG experiments in optically active solutions and show how the application of an additional static electric field to sum-frequency generation allows the absolute configuration of the chiral solute to be determined via all electric-dipolar process. Results from ab initio calculations of the SFG pseudoscalar are presented for a number of chiral molecules

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems